Tracy Clark Flory is a sex blogger for Salon. I first became acquainted with her writing in 2008, when she referenced Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both by Laura Sessions Stepp. That book was very instrumental in opening my eyes to hookup culture, and was one of the things that inspired me to begin blogging. Clark Flory’s essay In Defense of Casual Sex was my first introduction to the concept of sex-positivity as a political offshoot of contemporary, fragmented feminism.
These books are just the latest result of the mounting abstinence movement, which, despite its religious roots, has recast its attack on “hookup” culture as secular, even feminist. The term “hooking up” — meaning anything from kissing to casual sex — can be traced back to the early ’80s, but only within the past few years did the hand-wringing really begin…Stepp spent years detailing so-called collegiate mating rituals — often lamenting a tendency among young women toward boozed-up hookups instead of cross-legged gatekeeping.
…Increasingly, young women are being told they are either respecting or exploiting themselves; they’re either with the “Girls Gone Wild,” sex blogger set or with the iron-belted and chaste.
Choose a side? No thanks. I’m a 24-year-old member of the hookup generation — I’ve had roughly three times as many hookups as relationships — and, like innumerable 20-somethings before me, I’ve found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships…Hookup culture is not the radical extreme it is so frequently mischaracterized as in the media.
[After attending a women's college] I opened those other, um, metaphorical gates of mine. OK, screw the modesty: My legs, I opened my legs…I went through a dressing room phase of trying on different men to see how they fit.
As far as I can tell, these choices don’t form a pattern, other than a refusal to really choose. I was like a college freshman filling out the Career Center’s job placement questionnaire, making an enthusiastic check mark next to every box; except, in my case, I was checking off men.
…There’s nothing unusual about my experience…For all the anxiety about “hookup culture” the truth is that for many people older than 20, “hookup culture” will sound remarkably like, well, “college.”
…I learned something from all of the men I dated. Sexually, I learned plenty about what turns me on. More important, by spending time in uncommitted relationships, what I wanted in a committed relationship became clearer — and it wasn’t amorous antagonism but a partnership that didn’t trigger self-protectiveness…Perhaps young women are putting feminist ideals of equality into sex by refusing shame and claiming the traditionally male side of the stud/slut double standard.
Reading that essay, I knew that I had met the enemy, the source of Grrrrl Power and Female Chauvinist Pigs, a snarky, brash, in your face creature that would be telling me to STFU for years to come. And yet, Clark Flory was not the worst of them. She doesn’t appear to be batshit crazy, or a confirmed hater of men. In a column about booty calls, she interviewed evolutionary psychologist Peter Jonason, expressing at least a smidgen of doubt:
TCF: A lot of what you’re saying is obviously very politically and philosophically … unpleasant. I think most of us have a desire to escape our basic biology, to evolve, to be better.
Jonason: As much as you want to escape your biology, there it is, in your face. Humans have the illusion that they can escape their biology, but we’re just like any other animal, the difference is our leash is longer. It appears that we have all this freedom to make these choices, but we really don’t.
Still, a year and a half later she defended casual sex with a vengeance in Casual Sex Backlash:
As I see it, young women have fully proved that we can have one-night stands, hear us roar – and maybe we’re beginning to also allow ourselves more nuanced feelings about our hookups…We can now acknowledge regret over a one-night stand, without being considered, or seeing ourselves as, forever ruined women; if there’s been a recent change in my generation’s relationship to casual sex, I suspect it’s that we’re relaxing our defensive posturing.
By January of 2011, then 27, Clark Flory seemed rather fatigued by the effort of keeping things casual in Does Friends with Benefits Work?
When you talk to people who have been there and done that — and even those who are continuing to do that — the response is overwhelmingly negative. As my own former “friend with benefits” put it to me, “I’ve been in so many of these situations and, basically, they work until they don’t.”…In his self-deprecating style, he made no secret of his undatability. He was prone to post-coital declarations like, “You’ll be done with me soon. I’m a drunken emotional mess!” …Only that was kind of the point: So was I. I wanted company, warmth and no danger of attachment.
…Except that in reality there was. I actually liked him, quite a bit, as a human being…At some point I realized that, despite my insistence otherwise, I actually wanted those sorts of intimacies, only with an actual commitment.
Now a blogger of sexploits who wanted to chuck it all for a relationship, Clark Flory scrambled to put her history of hookups in the context of normal, even healthy, 20-something behavior in Men: The New Romantics?
I’ve been trying to explain about my “hookup” generation for years now: 35 percent of respondents report having had a hookup turn into a long-term relationship. Coontz sees this as “a very good example of the decline of the [sexual] double standard.” She points out that during at least the first half of the 20th century, it was common for a man to say, “Anybody who would do that isn’t good enough for me.” She says, “People get so hysterical about ‘friends with benefits’ and ‘hookups’ but very often these are interim behaviors.”
When, earlier this year, I read Clark Flory’s Bringing Home a Porn Star, I felt something like maternal concern even as I struggled to tamp down my revulsion. Oh, this woman’s poor mother!
I was at a neighborhood bar when in walked a man that I’d slept with before — virtually speaking. We had traded intimacies without ever having met. I grabbed my friend’s arm and whispered, “My favorite male porn star just walked in the door.” Seeing him in person, there was one thought on my mind: I need to sleep with him.
I asked my friend to tell him that I liked him and then ran and hid at the bar. Mid-sip, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “I hear you’re a fan of my work,” he said — and suddenly I was starring in my own personal porno, bad script and all.
There’s no need to go into great detail — do a Google search for “porn” and you’ll find an approximate representation of what followed between us. It’s exactly what I had breathlessly watched him do many times before, but this time it seemed mechanical and theatrical. Instead of being entertained, I was doing the entertaining, and I suspect he was too — but for whom, exactly? We were the only audience.
All of which is to say: It was like nearly every casual hookup I’ve ever had. Here were two strangers connected only by their fantasies of who the other was.
Afterward, he stood up, stark naked, and strutted around my room with his hands on his hips. He nodded as he circled, taking in the belongings of the woman he’d just fucked, pro bono. Then he clapped, “Well! I better be getting home now.”
Despite the emptiness of it, I felt a sense of accomplishment over my conquest. I mean, I slept with my favorite male porn star!…Sleeping with my favorite male porn star was thrilling and fun. It’s a memory that I occasionally turn to for private titillation — when YouPorn doesn’t do the trick.
Not long after, the whole charade came crashing down, as Clark Flory confessed she’d never gotten off in a single casual encounter. From Years of Faking:
Postcollege, I became a full-time reporter, blogger—and orgasm faker. I had strong feminist political inclinations, but I was also deeply afraid of male rejection; my intellectual ideals clashed with my personal insecurities…I chose performed enthusiasm over more authentic sexual experience…in the years that followed, I moved on to faking multiple orgasms.
Around this time, I wrote an essay titled “In Defense of Casual Sex,” about how hookups had helped me explore my sexuality—and they had. But it was exploration through the eyes of men: I was focused on how my partners saw me. I didn’t mention that I’d faked it during nearly all of my dalliances. It seemed embarrassing to admit, and personally inconsequential. I just figured that I was one of those women for whom orgasms are extremely difficult, but even without them sex was a physical rush. Which is not to mention what a blast it was to date or become otherwise involved with a rainbow array of men—from a Muay Thai kickboxer to a big-deal lawyer.
Clark Flory turned out to be a fraud. In championing and justifying her own sordid sexcapades, she had sought to romanticize her experiences as empowering and deeply satisfying. In truth, it was her need for ego validation and her inability to orgasm that characterized her sexual experiences, leaving her with considerable emotional wreckage.
This month Clark Flory signals that she is ready to be done with casual sex. From Who Needs Casual Sex?:
There’s little that could shock me on a first date (or “date,” heavy on the air quotes). Not dirty talk, not sex — not even non-verbal attempts at anal. One gent announced within a couple hours of meeting me that he really wanted to stick a candle in my butt.
But being given flowers? Whoa.
When my recent date showed up at my door, minimalist bouquet in hand, I imagine I looked like I’d seen a ghost — of courtship past…Sure, we could be found post-midnight pressed up against a storefront on a street populated by intoxicated 20-somethings, the minty taste of Fernet fresh on our lips — but we didn’t have sex that night. We got back to my house and managed to unintentionally push all the decorative pillows off my living room couch, wedge my shoe under a cushion and knock over the fresh vase of flowers, before he announced, “As hard as this is going to be, I think the perfect end to this date would be for me to call a cab.”
What a revelation.
Even my serious relationships have started as seeming one-night stands. A couple of drinks as friends, some kissing and then a bed. This is what so many women of my generation do: We claim the same freedom to pursue our desires as men. We embrace the fun of exploration, the thrill of abandon. Sex doesn’t threaten to brand or disgrace us — at least not in any way that we recognize or respect. We aren’t defined by our “number” — we might not even keep track of it.
Hallelujah for that.
But, yes, as I’ve gotten older, casual sex has lost some of the luster of freedom. It isn’t that I’ve forsaken the delights of no-strings flings, but rather that I’ve tired of hookup culture’s dictatorial reign over modern courtship. It doesn’t feel so free when it doesn’t feel like an intentional choice….I’ve often had no one but myself to blame — especially when going after boys literally wearing warning signs in the form of tattoos reading things like, “I am what I am” or “forgive me.”
Sometimes, tearing off your clothes is just a pathetic attempt at taking control of the uncontrollable: love. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t always getting what I wanted from hookups. As a friend recently told me, “It’s a terror to put your heart on the line and ask for what you want. You don’t have to be naked to feel naked.” My M.O. has often been getting naked to not feel naked.
As a sex blogger, Clark Flory doesn’t have the luxury of hiding her past – any guy who chooses to date her is clearly cool with her Google search results. Now 28, her timing is perhaps perfect. If she’s lucky, she can step off the carousel and give monogamous commitment a whirl.
Despite her best efforts, she has won an important victory against casual sex. No amount of sex, with or without orgasms, with men who don’t care to see you again, is going to fill the huge hole in your self-esteem. Clark Flory has shared more stories of rejection in her blog posts than anyone should endure, and they’re almost entirely self-inflicted.
When one of the high priestesses of casual sex admits it’s a sham and a delusion, take her at her word. No doubt she’ll keep spewing the political talking points – Every woman should decide what’s right for her! Don’t be fooled – her misery may be found between the lines. If Mr. Right doesn’t work out, I shudder to think where Clark Flory’s career may take her next.
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Great post, Susan!! I’ll be linking it soon.
Thank you, Stuart!
I’ve followed Tracy’s articles over the years and the change is amazing. At 24 she was so arrogant in her “Defense of Casual Sex” but over the years it was easy to see through this. Everything she wrote was was a pathetic attempt to justify her one night stands but she sounded sad and emotionally unfulfilled.
The saddest thing of all may be how amazed and delighted she was to receive flowers from her date. Men have been giving flowers to women for what, hundreds of years, it’s a lovely gesture and she’s just getting this at 28?
Interesting.
I swear, all these girls punching above their weight has to be for the benefit of feeling superior to other women.
She’s written 331 pages about sex, and has yet to have an orgasm.
There is a not inconsiderable possibility, less than 50% but probably greater than 20%, that she may go to her grave without one.
@Mule
I think she said she never had one from a hookup/ons, not that she’d never had one at all.
Well, someone will marry her. Yes even her. But not unlike a prostitute, there are some serious childhood issues lurking in there. Its as simple as that and she is dismissed.
“it was common for a man to say, “Anybody who would do that isn’t good enough for me.”
That is one of very few admissions that this entire shit show women like Flory cook up is entirely dependent on men’s attitudes and they are the target for all this pathetic rhetoric.
“I felt a sense of accomplishment over my conquest”
How does an endeavor that requires zero effort amount to a conquest?
I would not touch her with a stolen cock.
I pity the poor man who is foolish enough to marry it.
It’s interesting that TCF mentions that she was doing all of this hooking-up for the attention for men. As someone who not only did the hookup scene but ventured into the wilder (and generally older) scene of swinging, the dynamic is real. In the swinging scene, it’s worse, because you’re dealing with someone 40+ who is more desperate for validation and attention, and doesn’t know how to get it without throwing their bodies in front of themselves.
In the partial defense of TCF though, there are women who can just hump for free, no particularly deep issues (or no moreso than the average person), no abuse, no neglect, just a high amount of T for a woman and a raging sex drive. Their choices should be respected and protected. That said, there are few women out there like that, and they’re literally worth their weight in gold. The vast majority are women who need male attention, and are willing to do anything for it.
@Abbot
Her accomplishment is that she’s gotten to hang around men (and be validated by their penises) who her stature wouldn’t allow her to otherwise hang around. The achievement is getting cool high-status dudes to talk to her, period.
@Andy
I don’t know. She’s someone both self-aware enough to know she has issues and is willing to change. She might backslide into her old ways, but she may finally face her demons and come out OK. Stay tuned on TCF.
“Their choices should be respected and protected. That said, there are few women out there like that, and they’re literally worth their weight in gold.”
Hell yes. A constant and roving population of them is sorely needed
“The achievement is getting cool high-status dudes to talk to her, period.”
She wears her vagina on her sleeve
Smart people learn from their mistakes.
Smarter people learn from other people’s mistakes.
You cannot turn a whore into a housewife. It is futile to try. She will be whining about real men soon and ‘manning up’ as any man with any sense will not want this spunk beast for a wife.
It sucks for her but she has made herself worthless. I see cats in her future.
Afterward, he stood up, stark naked, and strutted around my room with his hands on his hips. He nodded as he circled, taking in the belongings of the woman he’d just fucked, pro bono. Then he clapped, “Well! I better be getting home now.”
The poignancy of the line I bolded always affects me whenever I see this TFC quote. When I’m in a person’s home for the first time, I always look for some object that symbolizes a connection, something in common, with this person–a book, a print by an artist I like, a piece of furniture in a style I like. There is something terribly sad about their mechanically going through the motions of intimacy, their finding no connection and his running out as though the house is on fire. Perhaps some of the disgust people feel after NSA sex comes from the physical intimacy of the act coupled with the lack of real emotional intimacy.
One wonders how many metaphorical flowers she has turned down in her life.
“Perhaps some of the disgust people feel after NSA sex comes from the physical intimacy of the act coupled with the lack of real emotional intimacy.”
Well in this case they are both nsa pros…
@Susan, it interesting, the debate on her future.
I see her married, just as others do, in light of some of the conversations on the previous thread about how an average man might look at her if the sex is good, and also in light of something Todd mentioned.
There will always be some man who is going to be willing to wife her up because she is presumably good in bed with all those experiences–she has spent a lot of time learning how to please men sexually.
Did you ever hear that song? Where do all the porn stars go? They are not volvo driving soccer moms! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK_XWH7Ryd4
Putting aside the stories about men who knowingly marry low profile (non public figures), high number women, what about the stories from real life?
Jessica Cutler, the Congressional staffer who got caught in a blogging scandal and later went from a ho to a housewife:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2008/12/10/the-dc-sex-blogger-on-how-she-went-from-slut-to-housewife.html and: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2009/10/rs-cutler23.html
So even though TCF is a good example of regret, something tells me that a number of young women who are carousel watchers or who are on it now are not going to even going to think about it. Like you, I can only hope otherwise.
But for TCF as a woman of a certain type of elite background (I’m presuming here), she is well-insulated from negative repercussions. As has been said before, for the UMC, they can subvert traditional mores without any major effects.
Even better if she keeps up her looks and hasn’t “hit the wall….”
So she regrets it? The story will be, she learned a lot, and she is now better. Many will embrace her with open arms, if they didn’t embrace her already.
In addition, her mom might not be ashamed. She might be thinking “go, girl, I never had that chance,” or “go girl, you are just like me!”
She’s written 331 pages about sex, and has yet to have an orgasm.
Sad, but not unusual or surprising. Married women are more likely to have orgasms than single women are.
It’s the faking it that gets me. Why fake it? It just trains men to be bad lovers.
“Many will embrace her with open arms”
On the extreme end of the curve the fringers do find one another. Many stories of women who penpal hardcore prisoners and marry them upon their release is just one example. As long as its an extreme minority, these types will always have sufficient takers…But unlike women who marry prisoners, this Flory character also writes and attempts to influence other women so parents need to screen accordingly…
Well in this case they are both nsa pros…
It doesn’t matter. He was still human enough to look for a connection and run in abashment or fear when he didn’t find one. She was still human enough to hamsterize* the lack of connection. On some level, it hurt her.
*Yeah, I did it. After over two years of commenting, I finally said “hamster.” These women remind me of cats that do something clumsy and then look at you as if to say, “Yeah, I feel off the door, I meant to. What of it?”
@pvw
Did you ever hear that song? Where do all the porn stars go? They are not volvo driving soccer moms!
Hey, I have that car! Thank God you can buy one without having a tattoo or a colorful past. I can transport intruments and amps for two kids in it!
I wondered about that too.
Am I wrong in this? TCF seems to have been so preoccupied with her own self, her own pleasures and indeed, her own orgasms, that she’s never even considered anyone else. You know, the giving part, rather than the receiving part.
Doing what she does, I can’t help but think she’s been surrounded by so many who are just like her; looking for love and not recognizing it.
>> “Her accomplishment is that she’s gotten to hang around men (and be validated by their penises) who her stature wouldn’t allow her to otherwise hang around. The achievement is getting cool high-status dudes to talk to her, period.”
I think you’re right, but wow. That’s just so incredibly SAD!
Hey, welcome to being human. Even those outside of hookup culture do the same.
“Now 28, her timing is perhaps perfect. If she’s lucky, she can step off the carousel and give monogamous commitment a whirl. ”
She may get someone, but that someone will not be who she could have gotten. And she will likely divorce him eventually because she can no longer pair bond.
@Emily
Through some less than emotionally fulfilling experiences, I’ve met a lot of women like TCF. Strike that, I’ve met women who’ve gone much further down the rabbit hole than TCF has. The older I get, the sadder it seems to me. The thing is that unless you make a point to try to talk to these women, they’ll never bring it up. It usually has to be drawn out through the process of, you guess it, establishing intimacy.
Alcohol is abundant, ubiquitous and very cheap so anyone with a little money can drink it constantly and therefore, with no real effort, be an alcoholic. That’s Flory. But instead of money, her currency is pussy and that gives her access to all the abundant, ubiquitous and very cheap penis. Since sex sells as a topic (and better than alcohol), she knows she can write about it and make money. She is a prostitute once removed. Move along. Nothing to see here.
I’ve personally enjoyed TCF’s sharp writing and general “cool chick” free-spiritedness, but I figured that she frequently had to sensationalize aspects of her lifestyle to create buzz around each day-in-the-life episode. I didn’t believe the sex-with-a-pornstar-story, but it was certainly more fun to read than a “took the kids to soccer and then watched a sit-com” tale of normalcy.
Tucker Max faced many of the same creative demands and his reformed/confessional story arc may be similarly motivated.
People like TCF ae niche players who have to have a particular editorial slant, are only as good as their last posts, have to stay “on message”, etc. She seems like an SMP guinea pig or stunt-woman or test pilot, putting herself out on the ragged edge of the new mating landscape and then reporting back on it.
The thing that she may be finding is that a lot of male members of her cohort do not plan on necessarily exiting this culture post-college in a hasty way; on the contrary, they don’t have biological clocks audibly ticking away and they are less willing than previous generations were to stoically “take one for the team” in order to calibrate with a girl’s emotional needs timeline. IME, many young men do see this as a kind of golden age and have bought into a Guy Ritchie film “bros. before hoes” morality that, whatever its faults, does have its own internal logic.
One thing I have heard consistently expressed from male undergrads is that women cannot cherry-pick only those aspects of feminism/Girl Power opportunities and those aspects of traditional family values that benefit them and then combine the best features and impose the results on men. Things are just too deeply interconnected for that to work.
That said, if memory serves TCF is quite pretty in a delicate, gypsy sort of way (or am I thinking of someone else?) and I would guess that she will be able to land a reasonably high-SMV/MMV male if and when the time comes, despite her rambunctious past. In extremis, she may just say that it was all BS, done for shock value, etc. I bet Tucker played his exploits down when he needed to.
I give her a 46% shot at marriage, a 78% shot at divorce, a 12% shot at a brief dalliance with lesbianism, a 27% shot at actually reproducing, and am 84% shot at becoming the poster child for her embittered generation.
Look, I feel for the kid. And casual sex does work for some people. For most people, there’s a brief spate of it between long term relationships or an experimental week of Spring Break. The educational value of it is as dubious as that of watching porn. The emotional value — for those who don’t look upon sex as a sport — is going to be telling. Particularly when most of the men she meets will recoil in horror at her number even as they try to add to it. She’s not “wife material” by most sane standards.
But I’m a romantic. I believe in Twu Wuv . . . and I believe in Game. They are both decent mating strategies. Feminism, as a mating strategy, is far less decent. I cover why here (and thanks for the set up, Susan) http://theredpillroom.blogspot.com/2012/10/game-is-mating-strategy-so-is-twu-wuv.html#comments
In this case, this poor girl resolutely followed feminism’s dictate to not get too close to men and learn about yourself. Now she realizes (or soon will) that she’s pursued a poor mating strategy if her goal is a long-term match. Not only is a dude going to be able to overlook her number, but he’s also got to be cool with being blogfodder and possibly being made an example of in a nasty break-up to rationalize her allegiance to feminism. While she’s been “learning about herself” some other girl has been learning how to handle relationships. She’s competing with that girl, and it’s not going to be pretty, no matter where she fits in the SMP. Spending her sexual capital like that was foolish, she’ll realize in retrospect. And she’ll have to lower her standards considerably.
Unless she gets lucky — like I said, I do believe in Twu Wuv. But after reading her stuff, I doubt her ability to recognize it when it’s right in front of her.
…Freakin’ A.
(And she couldn’t even get off?)
To Jonason I say “pbbbbt.” Some people will be slaves to biology and others will use free will. We all get old, we all die, sure, but he sounds sort of how I did when I was freaking out last month.
“any man with any sense will not want this spunk beast for a wife.”
Glad I wasn’t chewing when I read that.
It’s a sad indictment that Roissy continually gets validated over and over again.
The Alpha seed and Beta commitment dual mating strategy.
Call me evil but I’m glad. She is getting exactly what she deserves for promoting such an empty and pointless lifestyle.
That article she wrote about banging the porn star literally made me sick to my stomach. Such a cold, mechanical, callous view of sex disturbs me regardless of the sex of the author. I have the same reaction when reading similar stories on ‘sphere sites. I see such people as sexual narcissists, although plenty of them are likely actual narcissists as well. I could never trust them to be capable of actual emotion during sex, and therefore I could not be in a relationship with one.
I remember reading “In Defense of Casual Sex” a few years ago and wishing I could be like Tracy- the type of girl who is able to “learn” something from each casual sexual partner and come out on the other end with increased knowledge of “what I wanted in a committed relationship.” Instead, the only thing I “learned” was that the guy in question usually wasn’t interested in me beyond sex and, thus, perhaps I wasn’t worth a committed relationship at all. I now realize that even the girls that boast of how much they enjoy casual sex are still hurt deep down when the guy isn’t interested in getting to know them beyond hooking up. They, like Tracy, are often just really good at hiding their negative feelings.
Very nice article, the chronology would be lost on anyone who read the articles over the years, but the summary brings forth the hypocrisy of the message loud and clear.
The conversation with the evolutionary psychologist is interesting, and highlights how Feminism has failed to keep up with biological sciences. Evolutionary psychology is a new field, much newer than Feminism, and hardly more than a soft science at the moment (see Ryan’s “Sex at Dawn” versus the rest), but it’s underpinned by behavioral studies in animals. For example, Judith Butler’s notion that sex and gender are separable, that our our physical differences don’t result in psychological differences, is completely contradicted by biology.
Clark Flory today:
If I were her, my biggest fear would be that men would consider me too high risk for the soccer mom role. Google never forgets.
If she does “retire,” she follows other sex bloggers who have done the same.
Tracie Egan Morrissey, aka Slutmachine, who went from this (holding knife):
to this:
@lalady
Thanks for sharing and please continue to as you have insights or experiences that can help everyone understand the female point of view.
Feminism co-opted Marxism, the epitome of 19th century “science”. It hasn’t really evolved beyond that and basic Humanism, with a big fat spackle of feminine privilege across the top. How much of modern feminism is informed by modern science, and not antiquated ideology? When feminist sex scientists study the facts on the ground of primate and human mating behavior, their hamsters have to do backsprings to spin it in a politically positive sense. They end up generalizing things to keep from offending LGBT folks and end up with mediocre science and vaguely accurate findings.
The biggest criticism of Evolutionary Psychology is that “you can’t prove that!” because we can’t actually study our ancestor’s sexual habits and for all we know modern primates and tribal cultures are completely different from the way our ancestor’s actually mated — not that it makes a difference anymore because we are HUMAN and our minds can override our biology! Biology is NOT destiny! We do not need to enslave ourselves to the cultural chains of the Patriarchy! It’s mere culture and society, quite easily changed with a few simple sacrifices on the — HEY, ARE YOU STARING AT MY TITS?
Ahem. In any case, feminism as an ideology keeps getting nailed these days. Poor girls. They have the jobs, the money, the power, the respect . . . oh, but no one wants to marry them.
Here’s an interesting question, folks, let’s see if anyone knows where I can find data. How more likely is a couple to divorce when the woman is a self-described feminist vs. those who say they are not? That would be a very tasty statistic to chew on. To be able to tell a dude, “hey, that chick who says she’s a feminist? She has a 12% higher chance to divorce you and take you to the cleaners and never let you see your kids again” — that would be some valuable information to have.
Anyone have any leads?
That wedding picture of Slutmachine just makes her seem so dead and lifeless.
It almost makes me feel sorry for the guy.
As for this girl, she literally uses guys for emotional validation and thinks nothing of them. I do feel for the girl…right up until I realize that about her.
And then all that sympathy just melts away.
Eh, I think she had sex with plenty of betas. The giver of flowers is almost certainly a beta (and feminist), but she seems psyched, and genuinely attracted. I don’t get the sense that she’s settling in the way Lori Gottleib recommended.
@lalady
This was the bill of goods sold to women. I do feel enormous empathy for women who bought it, even temporarily.
Thank you for your honesty. I feel certain that the vast majority of women who have embraced casual sex as their default are miserable. They are always welcome here.
@Ian Ironwood
I have half a mind to go into the business of conducting studies. So many great ideas, questions we need answers to, and no one appears to give a damn. Too bad I have no credibility.
@Ian Ironwood
Great post, and I have two points: one about TCF and one about feminism in general.
With regard to TCF, she mentioned in her post (and in her previous writings) that she’s been involved in relationships. To me, she’s not as far behind as one would think. After all, just because someone is in a relationship doesn’t mean that they know how to function within one, or that they’re learning to adjust. If she was *merely* “carousel riding” to use the blog parlance, I’d see your point, but based on her word, she appears to be not too far out of wack from the norm in relationships.
In regard to feminism’s fear of getting close to men (specifically second wave), it has a lot to do with a lot of women being hurt by men. Not hurt as in “oh, my daddy didn’t get me a pony” but hurt as in “my dad used to beat me like a rented mule every Friday, my uncle molested me, and a couple of dudes raped me in college.” I’ve noticed that a lot of the feminists that go hardest in the paint against men are people who were abused by men, and no wonder.
If your experience with men was that they treated you like crap, you aren’t going to be a great candidate for intimacy no matter what. That said, that doesn’t mean they are to be held responsible or accountable for the abuse that happened to them. They’re responsible for their reaction and future treatment of men, yes, but not responsible for the original wounds.
Too bad I have no credibility.
How could anyone take you seriously if you don’t have credentials?
The point that is most interesting here relates to her lack of orgasms.
One point is the obvious feminist one that men don’t care about women’s pleasure in sex. I would say that this is not a correct statement, but rather that it is true that in *hookups* men don’t care about women’s pleasure in sex. Why would they? There isn’t any longer term thing in play. And Roosh has well summed up the lack of impact this seems to have on women agreeing to hook up — TCF only confirms this.
The other point is that it is laughable that a woman could view having sex with a man without an orgasm as a “conquest”. Even leaving aside the obvious differences when it comes to “getting sex” (i.e. — a male fan of a female porn star doesn’t get to have sex with her from being her fan). Men see sex as conquest both because it is hard to get, but also because we inevitably come during sex. Either in a woman (as I prefer) or on her (as porn encourages men to do, but which I don’t like). But conquest without coming is not on — and it’s a joke that it’s otherwise for women.
The truth of the matter is that she was used for orgasms and got some validation in return. And that’s a pretty sad tradeoff.
I have half a mind to go into the business of conducting studies. So many great ideas, questions we need answers to, and no one appears to give a damn. Too bad I have no credibility.
Don’t be so sure about it, It might be just be me but I had noticed that in soft science if you have enough valid references people will accept you as a credible source. Specially if you had been studying a subject matter. With online education, university courses being sold so people can learn at home, cheapening of booksm Kindle… I think we will have a renascence of Autodidacticism, just my two cents.
(i.e. — a male fan of a female porn star doesn’t get to have sex with her from being her fan)
Some independent porn stars actually advertise this “bonus” of having sex with their fans as part of the lure for them to sell the movies, I think is a growing trend actually.
Well, they wouldn’t. I can’t even get readers to take seriously the studies of people with credentials up the wazoo. It’s just my narcissism showing – I feel confident I could design and run better studies than those being done by PhDs
@Susan in re 41:
Honestly, you don’t need credibility so much as you need funding and to find journals which conduct blind review of submitted articles. With funding also comes the ability to simply buy the credibility you need.
@Brendan
It was interesting – TCF describes how several of her partners did take an interest – and she rewarded them with loud exclamations of pleasure. Of course, this served to make them believe that she was highly orgasmic, and that they were studs in the sack. She talks about one breakup where she told the guy she had faked all but one orgasm, and he replied, “I’m not surprised. I mean, I am not some magic orgasm machine or anything.” Here she was exploring her sexuality and finding her “bliss,” and really she was just boosting the egos of the men she was with, to a degree that at least some found unlikely.
I have often described casual sex as masturbation with another warm body in the room – to the extent that either party cares about the other’s pleasure, it’s generally a question of reputation. This is the vulnerability that Karen Owen sought to exploit with her Duke F*ck List. For serious players only!
For me, the saddest moment of all her sad moments was when the porn star wants to go home after “mechanical and theatrical” sex, yet she rationalizes this by saying it was “thrilling and fun.” Clearly the sex was neither thrilling nor fun – all she got out of it was a Sex and the City style story to be shared over brunch.
Susan…”I feel confident I could design and run better studies than those being done by PhDs”
You probably *could* do better than many of these studies…you might have to get a consulting statistician for help, but I suspect that many of the PhD researchers could also do with a little statistical assistance.
Rounding up the subjects might be an issue, since you wouldn’t have easy access to college students, but surely there are ways to do this.
That wedding picture of Slutmachine just makes her seem so dead and lifeless.
Her husband is wearing that “happiest day of my life smile;” she looks a little smug. Nice looking guy though. She bagged a cutie.
@david foster
I was mostly joking about doing research, but now you’ve got me thinking that it might be very possible to do some informal studies. Vox Day has done this several times. If I were to do the real thing, I would definitely need a statistician. Intriguing possibilities! I love the idea of exploring issues regardless of how PC they are, and I don’t think it would necessarily be that expensive.
Tracie Egan Morrissey, aka Slutmachine
That name just kills me. Does her mother know?
I can remember reading the Clark-Flory piece “In Defense of Casual Sex” when it first appeared, and my immediate, tribal-centered reaction was this was a kind of death-knell for mid-pack young men; “sex-positive” is positive for thee, but not for me. It’s taken a bit longer to appreciate how she may have been fooling and hurting herself in the longer run; which is arguably an even sadder story given that she was the one with near-maximal choice.
BB: “People like TCF ae niche players who have to have a particular editorial slant, are only as good as their last posts, have to stay “on message”, etc. She seems like an SMP guinea pig or stunt-woman or test pilot, putting herself out on the ragged edge of the new mating landscape and then reporting back on it.”
Does this put anyone else in mind of Chelsea Handler? She appears to be all-in on this patrol and making quite a go of it; I think I even saw her on the cover of a big-time women’s mag last month. Meanwhile the pioneering TCF reaps only emptiness; hardly seems fair, even by these standards.
@J
Honestly, I really feel for the moms of these women. Once I said something along these lines to Jaclyn Friedman – I admit it was a cheap shot – and she got totally incensed. “You leave my mother out of this!” Yikes.
Agreed, she did very well for herself. I think she looks beautiful in that wedding photo – she went from a ghoul to a lovely bride. I can’t imagine why such a guy would choose to marry “Slutmachine.”
I think Chelsea Handler is the real deal. The rare woman who has sex like she’s Arnold Schwarzenegger or Tiger Woods. Young women I know read her books and find her hilarious – this troubles me. I find her repellent and coarse. She’s perfect for American TV though – give the people what they want.
“That wedding picture of Slutmachine just makes her seem so dead and lifeless.”
Wishful thinking – she looks very alluring. Also lost about thirty if I’m not mistaken. Alpha females have the power, whether they use it for good or ill is the big question.
The beta females will dance to their tune (no way a beta female is pulling off that transformation, by the way), whatever they choose to call.
“The rare woman who has sex like she’s Arnold Schwarzenegger or Tiger Woods.”
Strange examples. Arnie’s pure sigma, and Tiger’s a beta Urkel who got lured to the dark side by his alpha superstar buddies and had no idea how to handle it. She’s more a female Tucker Max.
No alpha would have gotten his ass handed to him by the nurses/teachers unions like Arnie did. Not many alphas on the R side for a good long stretch there. Romney and Ryan are trying to reconnect with their inner alpha – we’ll see if they get there.
He turned a ho into a housewife!
Congrats to the lovely couple.
Susan we discussed over at the other thread that OOW baby mamas don’t necessarily have high N, and that’s been my practical work experience as well. I want to say this, I think its better practice safe sex and have a high N then have a low N and an oow baby you don’t have the means to support.
What’s your take on that?
I dunno. She does not look alluring to me. Guess I might be wrong.
@Brendan
One point is the obvious feminist one that men don’t care about women’s pleasure in sex. I would say that this is not a correct statement, but rather that it is true that in *hookups* men don’t care about women’s pleasure in sex. Why would they?
It was interesting – TCF describes how several of her partners did take an interest – and she rewarded them with loud exclamations of pleasure. Of course, this served to make them believe that she was highly orgasmic, and that they were studs in the sack. She talks about one breakup where she told the guy she had faked all but one orgasm, and he replied, “I’m not surprised. I mean, I am not some magic orgasm machine or anything.” Here she was exploring her sexuality and finding her “bliss,” and really she was just boosting the egos of the men she was with, to a degree that at least some found unlikely.
—————————
The only men women need to feel they should fake orgasms for are their husbands or men who are committed to and love them. Otherwise NEVER feed the ego of a casual sex stud.
I don’t recommend faking orgasms regularly for/with committed partners either, but occasionally, if he’s trying really hard and its just not happening, and you know he will feel bad if he thinks you aren’t enjoying it, then its not so bad.
“wishing I could be like Tracy- the type of girl who is able to “learn” something from each casual sexual partner and come out on the other end with increased knowledge of “what I wanted in a committed relationship.
This was the bill of goods sold to women. I do feel enormous empathy for women who bought it, even temporarily.”
So many bought it because exploring one’s options and getting a sense of what one needs in a partner and what one brings to a relationship while at the top of her SMV does actually beat serial monogamy, where the boyfriends were as much for status as for practicing the relational skills necessary for a good marriage.
Then the sex-pozzies ruined it by glorifying having sex “like a man,” which in their minds meant the worst men.
“Guess I might be wrong.”
Nah, different strokes. I’d put money on her rating pretty high is a poll of men with no knowledge of her background though.
Women are often self-deluded about how they are harming themselves. Perhaps the pathetic stupidity of this sort of story would become more apparent if I translated it from female to male.
A young man comes into a substantial inheritance that, like a woman’s youthful beauty, he did nothing to merit. He discovers that all sorts of attractive women love spending time with him when he lavishes his wealth on them. One time he even takes a supermodel to an expensive restaurant, though she immediately walks out after dinner is over. He argues that casually spending lots of money on one-time dates and gifts to women he meets in bars is empowering, but years later he admits that he actually bedded very few of them. His money begins to run out as he approaches his 30s, but because of his former wealth, he never bothered learning any job skills or cultivating any attractive masculine qualities. Sadder, but wiser, he now looks for that quality woman who will see that all his prior experience of freely spending money on bimbos for no sex in return actually helped him grow as a person and become a better husband. And he is now ready to give his love to that woman, but she shouldn’t be so shallow to resent that he has only $20 left to spend on her.
Wishful thinking – she looks very alluring.
I’m getting the feeling that you have a thing for bad girls. Don’t listen to the Sirens they will make you drown.
and Tiger’s a beta Urkel
Please don’t compare that cheating bastard with one of my fictional boyfriends.
@ Purple Tortoise
“his prior experience of freely spending money on bimbos for no sex in return actually helped him grow as a person and become a better husband”
paralleled with:
“her prior experience of freely sexing up bad boys for validation, no reciprocated emotional intimacy and no demand of commitment actually helped her grow as a person and become a better wife”
How is anything of this nonsense helpful to anyone goring as a person?
ugh typing in the dark fail… what I meant was:
How is any of this nonsense helpful to anyone growing as a person?
Society’s Disposable Son October 10, 2012 at 12:33 am
@ Purple Tortoise
“his prior experience of freely spending money on bimbos for no sex in return actually helped him grow as a person and become a better husband”
paralleled with:
“her prior experience of freely sexing up bad boys for validation, no reciprocated emotional intimacy and no demand of commitment actually helped her grow as a person and become a better wife”
How is anything of this nonsense helpful to anyone goring as a person?
———————
ITS POSSIBLE!
Much of marriage is compromise, if not straight up sacrifice, so the first scenario will help acclimatize him.
The second scenario will build her bedroom skills obviously, which after marriage her husband gets the benefit of.
Cup half full.
@purple tortoise
absolutely brilliant
It’s interesting though that when remembering all those visual studies of images of “LTR-oriented” vs “STR-oriented” girls, she looks much more closely to those “LTR-oriented” girls…
”I’ve followed Tracy’s articles over the years and the change is amazing. At 24 she was so arrogant in her “Defense of Casual Sex” but over the years it was easy to see through this. Everything she wrote was was a pathetic attempt to justify her one night stands but she sounded sad and emotionally unfulfilled.
The saddest thing of all may be how amazed and delighted she was to receive flowers from her date. Men have been giving flowers to women for what, hundreds of years, it’s a lovely gesture and she’s just getting this at 28?”
Yes, but she was amazed and delighted to receive flowers from her date when her good looks and fertility were already gone.
Take for example the average-looking guy. He can be the lost poetical heir of Lord Byron, but if he writes a poem and gives it to an equally average(or even below average) girl, the girl will see the guy as creepy/loser/desperate and will ignore the guy and go out of her way to not see him, whereas the tall/muscular/bad boy near-retard dude can say the most obscene things to her, can completely ignore her and on and on, but he’s still going to get sex/female attention and a relationship, if he so wants it.
”It’s interesting though that when remembering all those visual studies of images of “LTR-oriented” vs “STR-oriented” girls, she looks much more closely to those “LTR-oriented” girls…”
Alpha males or good-looking betas are extremely hard to pin down and to pair them up long-term wise. I’ve seen very sweet and shy girls lament their lack of a boyfriend but when the jock shows up, their eyes light up, and the rest of the guys who are truly interested in them are left to the sidewalks and to remain as beta orbiters.
A long-term girl will indulge in a short-term relationship IF the Alpha male wants to have casual sex with her. The long-term girl will wait as long as its necessary to be in the sphere of the Alpha male/model-looks beta male while ignoring the men who are in her league.
Basically, there is no ”ltr girl” nor ”str” girl because it depends on the men she’s surrounded by.
“How is any of this nonsense helpful to anyone growing as a person?”
I’m still waiting for that to be explained too.
(We need Abbot to make another penis crack, I am 12 years old so those haven’t stopped amusing me yet.)
@Purple Tortoise and Szopen,
I agree, brilliant, truly brilliant:
“His money begins to run out as he approaches his 30s, but because of his former wealth, he never bothered learning any job skills or cultivating any attractive masculine qualities. Sadder, but wiser, he now looks for that quality woman who will see that all his prior experience of freely spending money on bimbos for no sex in return actually helped him grow as a person and become a better husband. And he is now ready to give his love to that woman, but she shouldn’t be so shallow to resent that he has only $20 left to spend on her.”
My thoughts: What a wonderful story, to imagine the male equivalent of a TCF.
The man in your story proved himself to be an emotionally promiscuous woman-pleaser, not a good bet for a man in a long term relationship, because he freely gives up his valuable financial resources to women with whom he has no commitment. He is less valuable now as a husband, now that he has spent his money on “wine, women, and song.”
As a husband, he will not be a dedicated family man; his first thoughts about spending his resources will not be on his family. He will fritter away his resources on foolishness, ie., other women (with whom he might have emotional affairs) or the sob story of the day (most likely a woman’s sob story), while depending on his wife to take care of all the family’s financial needs. He never imagined that he would have to do what men have been expected to do from time immemorial, conserve their financial resources in order to support a wife and family some day.
As for a woman like TCF,the female example we began with, the corollary of the young man with the big inheritance, she proved herself to be a physically promiscuous woman seeking emotional validation from men’s sexual attentions which didn’t even satisfy her.
It only made her proficient at attracting men who would use her sexually. Male sexual attention is like a drug for her; she was always chasing the next fix. But emotional connection is difficult; yet it is different from the supposed emotional validation of being able to gain men’s sexual attraction. She hardened herself through years of seeing her connections to men only through a sexual lens.
So now that she is older and wiser, and presumably less attractive than when she was younger, she wants some man to marry her with the baggage she has. As a wife, will she be the type to constantly crave attention from men and not be satisfied with the attention from her husband?
@Purple Tortoise
That’s brilliant. The funniest thing is, I’ve actually known a couple of guys like that!
@Mullan
False. This has been covered many times here. If you can’t cite a source other than a Game blogger we’ll just chalk this up to ignorance.
This is an awesome post Susan!
As someone who is practically the same age as Tracy Clark Flory but took a different path (no ONS or FWB by choice), it’s interesting how we both came to the same conclusions about casual sex. I’ve always felt that I would find casual sex to be empty and it would hurt me emotionally to engage in it, so I simply didn’t. TCF, however, had to experience it first hand to know it was something that’s unfulfilling to her.
Chalk it up to being intuitive (INFP) or having future time orientation, but even growing up I could spot destructive behavior from a mile away. My mind connects the actions with consequences, so if there’s no “upside” for me then I’m not going to mindlessly join the herd! Still, it’s amazing to me that so many people lack this ability.
While I have no doubt some women enjoy the carousel as much as men do, but they’re a small minority. I think most women who ride the carousel get off it after a few rides or delude themselves that they’re empowering themselves as TCF did!
The most interesting part of this story to me is Flory’s views and reasoning as she ages through her 20s. At 24, sex positivity is a boon to her and women everywhere. In January 2011, she’s 27 and the bloom is off the rose.
Flory hits bottom at age 28 when she has sex with her favorite male porn star. She realizes her fall from grace when she doesn’t come during the sex (which, with a male porn star, should be the very pinnacle of sex-positivity experience), and instead suffers the humiliation of seeing him prance about her place afterward, admiring his “accomplishment”. He then literally, a few moments later, gets dressed and leaves. She has to rationalize it by calling it “thrilling and fun” when it obviously was not. I don’t think I’ve ever read a pump and dump described in more florid (heh) detail.
She then writes a mea culpa last month, at age 28. She’s now coming up on 29 years old.
Here’s what has really happened with Flory: This is merely a series of writings describing in real time a young woman moving through slutty behavior and realizing its fruitlessness as she ages. Now almost 29, she’s either past or nearing her day of reckoning with The Wall. Flory now realizes she has nothing to show for her past sluthood other than using her life as a template for her vocation. She is now scrambling to compose her mea culpas in the hopes of reassembling the pieces.
To me, this just reinforces that no woman, anywhere, anytime, escapes The Wall.
I looked at that picture of TCF at SW’s comment at 35. TCF is pretty enough, but I have to say she appears older than her 28-almost-29 years. She looks to be in her mid-30s.
More anecdotal evidence to these mid-40s eyes that that lifestyle takes its toll on women in general.
Nonetheless, I am sure some man somewhere will be willing to marry her as long as he doesn’t read of her sexcapades with the male porn star. Susan, I think you’re right that her biggest risk is that she can’t conceal or sugar-coat her past. What man is going to want to wife up a woman who can’t (or didn’t, or couldn’t) orgasm with a porn star going to work on her?
“But he’s made the case, at least, that biology could lead to modern love, without any help from law or custom. “Culture came much later,” he told a reporter in the spring, “and only augmented things that were already in place.”
Then the female angst in certain isolated geographic areas is primarily due to artificial stimuli (BC pills) and alcohol, consumerism, mal parenting and external influences from some very narcissistic and bitter women – all neatly packaged and spit out as “sex positive”
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_evolution/2012/10/are_humans_monogamous_or_polygamous_the_evolution_of_human_mating_strategies_.single.html
.
“that lifestyle takes its toll on women in general.”
No more ga ga doe-eyed captivating and adoring woman left
“What man is going to want to wife up a woman who can’t (or didn’t, or couldn’t) orgasm with a porn star going to work on her?”
The fact that she was even willing disqualifies her. Some women in the US and near all other women are wives even if they are not yet married. Take a trip. Walk the streets. Chat. You can hear it in their voices. Challenge yourself. Be amazed.
“To me, this just reinforces that no woman, anywhere, anytime, escapes The Wall.”
and the extreme dearth of suitors eagerly waiting for her on the other side
@Iggles:
“Chalk it up to being intuitive (INFP) or having future time orientation, but even growing up I could spot destructive behavior from a mile away.”
Me: For me as an INTJ, my first thought would have been, aren’t you concerned that you might wind up on the front page of a newspaper as the woman who disappeared, got knifed in an alley, tossed out of a window, got murdered in her apartment, etc.? Don’t you have any natural sense of self-preservation?????
As I read your observations, I thought, what might be her type?
E: Definitely, to have so much sex with so many strangers, as I recoil at the thought and shudder, bleh!
S: She seems to live in experiencing her senses, ie., it only has meaning if she experiences it, and to dedicate her career to experiencing and writing about sex, says it all.
T: She is a thinker, as she seems to think mechanically, the sex is all about developing proficiency at pleasing men sexually. She is doing, as someone suggested, her own experiment into a cultural phenomena. She seems detached from her emotions, ie., she seemed at first to like having no emotional connection, but she eventually came to the realization that no emotional connection came to realize lack of sexual fulfillment for all her efforts. Pretty sad; she might have well been a sex doll.
P: She is not one to come to decisions early and quickly, like a J type might, that several years of hooking up sex with no orgasms just might be a problem…
Stuart Schneiderman has a post on Clark Flory worth a read – he wants to see her hold feminism accountable.
http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2012/10/escape-from-hookupville.html
Hey, guys, this is not rocket science. In order to make a woman orgasm you do as much foreplay as she needs to get lubricated and then you stimulate her clitoris until she has an orgasm. Turning a woman on and then dry humping her with your arm while she has her clothes on also works wonders.
vaginal intercourse does not, to most women, provoke an orgasm. Have you guys noticed that getting pounded 40 minutes doesn’t usually make a porn star orgasm? Most of them are completely dry. Many male porn stars use their saliva as lube but they still get the abrasive marks on their penises from rubbing it inside a dry vagina.
Male porn stars aren’t sex gods. Most of them are incapable of lasting more than 10 minutes, if that much, the rest of the movie comes from montages. Many, many of those guys take viagra to shoot a scene and even when they do it, they have to continue to stimulate their penises with their hands to maintain an erection.
I’ve also seen very fit guys with extremely hot chicks trying to get them hard, but the dudes would spend 20 minutes receiving oral sex and the penis would not become erect. Gay porn stars? Maybe.
Women aren’t lube factories, either. 10 to 20 minutes in they are eager for the guy to finish.
TCF: “A lot of what you’re saying is obviously very politically and philosophically … unpleasant. I think most of us have a desire to escape our basic biology, to evolve, to be better.”
The idea of *escaping* one’s basic biology strikes me as odd. Do airplanes *escape* the laws of physics in order to leave the ground? Of course not…they *use* the laws of physics. Ditto even for rockets.
“Escaping from biology” strikes me as magical thinking.
Mullan:
It’s a day at the office for porn actors/actresses. They do what they gotta do to get the job done, get the money shot, then they shower and go home. We get that.
But we all know that to the sex positivist or the porn consumer, it’s not about the mechanics, it’s about the fantasy. Sexing a porn star is a dream come true for most men; not much less so for a sex pozzie woman. From Flory’s writing you can almost see her building up the experience with the male porn star in her mind, letting her hamster spin at 100 mph, mentally and emotionally preparing herself and constructing the later narrative for her GFs, then getting the bang, then going “meh”.
Which is pretty much how it turned out.
““Escaping from biology” strikes me as magical thinking.”
I’ve always viewed this goal as rising above our baser instincts. However phrasing it this way tends to upset people’s more delicate sensibilities. We are all just animals with very large brains. We can use those brains to be more primitive, or we can use them to be something better than the animal nature that created us. The real issue in my eyes is that our society does NOT promote “rising above”, and instead wants everyone to pander to the lowest common denominator. I’d like to blame people for being too lazy or short sited to realize that they have a choice, but in many cases I don’t know that those people even know there IS a choice to be made.
Where’s Ian Ironwood, our resident smut merchant, when you need him?
Desi, it is a little odd to hear you use the Alpha/Beta terms. I would not have pegged you for someone who would decide to make use of that paradigm.
I am assuming that you do not buy into in the way that the likes of Roissy does, but still.
I think Slutmachine bagged a young Dennis Quaid.
Maybe I’m either more cynical or more optimistic than most (depending on if you like TCF or not), but I think TCF will only have problems finding a reasonable-quality LTR mate if she does so deliberately in order to maintain her “adventures of a single girl” theme.
At the risk of sounding shallow, past sins tends to be forgiven if the girl in question is hot enough; if TCF looked like Kate Upton, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation because the men here would all be over at her blog giggling about her tanned breasts.
TCF is an attractive writer for a hip, edgy org that is a darling of the culture-vulture set. I think she’ll get some finance guy who wants to establish his liberal street cred by saving rain forests and “reformed” hook-up participants. They will probably do some coke and have some 3somes, but in the end it may work out ok.
This brings me to a thought experiment. What if, instead of being a neo-bohemian sex-pozzie, TCF was married with N=2 at age 28-29, but her husband was 20+ years older, physically unattractive, and extremely wealthy?
Would we give her a break here? I would think not—I don’t think we’d celebrate her for “keeping the price of sex high”; we’d say that she was clearly a prostitute of some kind, albeit an exclusive high-$$$ contract girl rather than a freelance escort working bachelor parties in Detroit. We might even prefer the promiscuous, quirky-blogger TCF to some fucked-up, low-N-but-mercenary version.
I think that the good news in all of this is that, thanks to women like TCF who apparently develop almost artistically-motivated appetites for badboy cock, it is possible in this day and age for a man to have (if he wants it) a good turn or two with the ladies without being particularly rich or high in status. Perhaps occasionally a legit relationship may develop and there is something nice about this, a kind of “Lady and the Tramp” sensibility that we can all enjoy when, say, the female McKinsey consultant pairs off with the motorcycle-riding tattoo artist.
The bad news has at least two parts: 1) to enjoy this, the guy may need to be hot, perhaps really hot, or, alternatively, may need to be crafty/ruthless/manipulative; 2) if a guy doesn’t want to play the field, he may end up being “rewarded” with a TCF who did, and clearly this is a deeply troubling injustice for the man placed in such a scenario.
It seems like there may be a couple of groups that would be particularly affected here: if a man ignored/was ignored by high N temptresses and worked his ass off to be in a position to offer a comfortable, secure lifestyle and emotional support to his future spouse, but in the meantime he let himself go aesthetically and failed to develop hard, combative “alpha” type skills, he may find himself in the SMP at an initial competitive disadvantage to a loser with a six-pack, carnivore social confidence, and good cheekbones. The responsible hard-worker will be pissed and resentful if he is frozen out of the game for years and then suddenly becomes a woman’s Plan B, in extremis “break-glass-if-35-and-still-unmarried” safety choice.
On the other side, if a woman was planning on using privileged sexual access as some kind of asset or resource to trade for a particularly high-quality man, she may find that the price of sex has been lowered by women like TCF and, adding insult to injury, may then find that the more attractive of these women are in fact able to leave the fabled carousel and find decent guys when they do decide to hang up the spurs.
Obviously the men from case 1 and the women from case 2 have a lot in common and should be meeting. There’s something going wrong there and I don’t think it can be necessarily blamed on the STR-oriented hook-up artists.
if TCF looked like Kate Upton, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation
Kate Upton could have the Oakland Raiders run a train on her in public and still have a hundred wealthy idiots lined up to orbit and provide for her.
BB – “The bad news has at least two parts: 1) to enjoy this, the guy may need to be hot, perhaps really hot, or, alternatively, may need to be crafty/ruthless/manipulative; 2) if a guy doesn’t want to play the field, he may end up being “rewarded” with a TCF who did, and clearly this is a deeply troubling injustice for the man placed in such a scenario.”
Cosigned. It really doesn’t leave men with many options. Either “play the game”, or get over the fact that your future wife probably will. You will either meet her with comparable N and possibly a bad view of women, or you will meet her with a much lower N and a bad view of women. I guess if those are the choices, not “playing the game” does seem rather stupid, doesn’t it?
@Bastiat Blogger
For a different twist on 1 Peter 4:8:
“For hotness covereth a multitude of sins.”
“a woman’s Plan B”
That is the fate of many captive audience American men
@Suzan.
This is an excellent post … and I’ll be honest … I want nothing to do with Tracy Clark Flory … not even if she’s naked on my bed, with a flute up her arse, and playing Yankee Doodle for me.
To me, this just reinforces that no woman, anywhere, anytime, escapes The Wall.
I dunno, Det. You had me until you brought up the wall. While I certainly don’t agree with TCF or Egan’s lifestyle, I’m not sure either of them has “hit the wall.” Egan looks lovely in her wedding picture, and I’ve seen less dissolute women look older than TCF. I’m old enough to be either of their mothers, and men still flirt with me. This weekend, I watched an old buck attempt to pick up a 70something yo widowed friend of mine. I doubt there’s a point that healthy people become so repulsive that no one is interested.
“No alpha would have gotten his ass handed to him by the nurses/teachers unions like Arnie did.”
This is really not the place, but Ah-nold’s defeat had nothing to do with alpha/beta and everything to do with structural issues in California politics. If anything, his over-confident alphaness did him in.
As Machiavelli says, a prince needs to learn to imitate the fox and the lion. The lion frightens the wolves, the fox avoids the snares. Arnie pre-2005 was all lion and no fox.
Susan, the problem is not that you lack credibility, it’s that studies are expensive and you have no money. That problem can be solved.
The credibility problem would come to play in that no peer reviewed journal would ever publish your studies but there are ways around that too.
J – ” I doubt there’s a point that healthy people become so repulsive that no one is interested.”
Well some men (myself included) would NOT see TCF as “healthy”, at least not from a mental standpoint. I’ll be the asshole that says it: TCF is broken IMO. She may pull back from the brink and “reform”, but to me she is too far gone for me to EVER trust her to show me genuine love and emotional commitment. She will probably not have trouble marrying, because there are plenty of men that don’t feel the way I do. Good for her and them, but it isn’t a job I would volunteer for myself, and I honestly believe any man that does is a complete and total fool.
Nonetheless, I am sure some man somewhere will be willing to marry her as long as he doesn’t read of her sexcapades with the male porn star.
Where would he find such a man? Yet, I wouldn;t be surprised if she did eventually marry. Egan did well for herself with a similar past, no?
What man is going to want to wife up a woman who can’t (or didn’t, or couldn’t) orgasm with a porn star going to work on her?
Apaarently, screwing a favorite porn star even just a movie star is not the automatic orgasm inducer you’d think. Women don’t work that way. We’re more likely to come with someone who knows us well, cares about our pleasure, etc.
Well some men (myself included) would NOT see TCF as “healthy”, at least not from a mental standpoint.
That may well be true, but it doesn’t prove the existence of a wall. I was talking about the wall, not advocating for TCF.
J:
“While I certainly don’t agree with TCF or Egan’s lifestyle, I’m not sure either of them has “hit the wall.” ”
I don’t want to get too far into this out of respect for Susan and the tone she wants to foster around here. In particular, it’s not going to be too productive to get down deep into TCF’s relative “hotness”, ala Kate Bolick. But let me say this. I didn’t say TCF definitely hit The Wall, but I am saying if she hasn’t yet impacted it, she knows she soon will. I’m with Ted D that TCF wouldn’t be suitable as marriage material for a lot of men, most definitely not me.
Every woman hits The Wall. The only question is when, and how hard.
“Every woman hits The Wall. The only question is when, and how hard”
And how hard or soft the landing will be on the other side is solely dependent on the men residing there
Escoffier,
“This is really not the place, but Ah-nold’s defeat had nothing to do with alpha/beta and everything to do with structural issues in California politics. If anything, his over-confident alphaness did him in.
As Machiavelli says, a prince needs to learn to imitate the fox and the lion. The lion frightens the wolves, the fox avoids the snares. Arnie pre-2005 was all lion and no fox.”
Appreciate the response. You’re exactly right on the need for foxiness, which was my point.
I’ll admit to using alpha here in more of the Roissyian sense of the player who knows when to be the fox and when to be the lion. Alpha politicians play the (especially single) female vote by feeding the hamster when necessary and knowing when its necessary to do so.
That’s why I said Arnie’s a sigma. Until he ran for office, he didn’t care enough about what women thought of him to learn the intricacies involved in hamster care and feeding, nor did he likely need to given his other assets. It could also be argued that he gave in too easily to their frame and tried to supplicate to them (likely going against his instincts on the advice of his political advisers), which only made them despise him.
As for whether it belongs here, getting to positive-sum games like those advocated by Dr. J likely requires an understanding of how negative-sum games (such as those involving Arnie, representing the common good, versus the unions in this case) work and how to master them first. That’s the “tat” in tit-for-tat.
Without mastery of the tat, one never gets to tit.
J – “That may well be true, but it doesn’t prove the existence of a wall. I was talking about the wall, not advocating for TCF.”
“The Wall” doesn’t have to be old age ya know. “The Wall” is simply the point past which a woman can no longer pull a guy as high up the food chain as she could yesterday. Most women hit “The Wall” by getting older, but in TCF’s case she ran at “The Wall” full speed ahead and as Deti pointed out, she may not have hit it yet, but she is damn close to it. For a women that hasn’t even reached 30, that is a very scary thing.
J,
“I dunno, Det. You had me until you brought up the wall.”
If enough women delay marriage, some of them will definitely hit the wall, but Egan, Bolick, et. al. are bad illustrations of that truth. Alpha females have a get-out-of-jail-free card if they really want to marry well. Setting norms based on that is still a bad idea for the women who don’t.
Every woman hits The Wall. The only question is when, and how hard
I’m no so sure about that. I see widows in their 70s dating and even occasionally remarrying (though losing the late husband’s SS is a huge disincentive). But if even the elderly pair up again, where and what is the wall then?
My mom reached a point where my dad no longer felt the need to keep an eye on all the other old bucks at nursing home, but they were both crapping in their Depends at the time. Is that the Wall?
@Deti
I didn’t even think of that – I assumed the guy probably knows nothing about giving females orgasms, as they’re all faked in porn anyway. Either that or he wouldn’t bother with any but his own.
I meant that I assume most men would not wish to marry someone who sold autobiographical sex stories for a living.
“The Wall” is simply the point past which a woman can no longer pull a guy as high up the food chain as she could yesterday.
OK, that definition makes some sense. Thanks, Ted.
Most women hit “The Wall” by getting older,
Yeah, but men age too. Most of the widows I see can still pull a guy comparable to the late husband.
but in TCF’s case she ran at “The Wall” full speed ahead
So, it’s the dissolution…OK, I can see that.
J – “But if even the elderly pair up again, where and what is the wall then?”
See my post above. Perhaps 70yo women can sometimes still pair off. I’d wager that those women are probably leaps and bounds above the average 21you women in morality and values, which at that age is far more important than looks.
that being said, I bet that 70yo women could have pulled a higher status man when she was in her prime. THAT is the definition of the wall to me: anything after peak opportunity to bag a big fish. Surely such a woman can and often does find a man, but he will not be the highest/best/most alpha/”whatever trait you find important” man she “could” have snagged before.
In short, post wall the women as to settle for less than she would have previously.
“I assume most men would not wish to marry someone who sold autobiographical sex stories for a living.”
This is a safe assumption.
@J
The wall is not a good metaphor in some senses. It’s more like a gradual decline where the caliber of partner you can attract is declining too.
However, the wall is a good metaphor if the woman wants to attract the same level of men she was before 30, especially in terms of the man’s SMV.
J – “So, it’s the dissolution…OK, I can see that.”
There ya go!
J – “However, the wall is a good metaphor if the woman wants to attract the same level of men she was before 30, especially in terms of the man’s SMV.”
Well considering its use in the ‘sphere, doesn’t that make perfect sense? “The Wall” tends to appear when a Kate Bollick claims she can’t find a good man. Of course not! She should have found him a decade ago! In her case, she will probably do fine because of her position in life. But, how many women can claim the same?
”Every woman hits The Wall. The only question is when, and how hard”
And don’t forget that the more sexual partners a woman acquires, the quicker she hits the wall. Some women can, at least externally, maintain a youthful appearance, like this 32 year old woman down my street. She’s attractive and she has invited me to take tea at her house with her, but after being told by her that she averages 30 guys a year… nah, I think I’ll pass.
On the other hand I have met girls in their early 20′s, some in their late teens who’ve hit the wall pretty hard by the time I met them. They had the ”one-thousand cock” stare that is mentioned a lot in MGTOW forums, they were bitter, incapable of bonding with a man, and hopped from Alpha male to Alpha male as a rotation pump and dump girl – and yet they insisted in their belief that they were going to find a good guy to marry them.
That is, after they finally realized that Johnny B. wasn’t going to get down on one knee for her.
By looking at my sister and by controlling who she spends time with, I learn that the teen girls who are sexually active are usually the ones who have what I’d call the beta look(a semblance of resignation, slight frustration and weariness) but these girls are only 14-17 years old and already this toxic? The bright-eyed, always cheerful ones tend to be the deeply religious ones(virgins) and despite my sister belonging to the ”cheerleader” looks department both my dad and I know what these boys sniffing around want and my sister dutifully knows that boys are off-limits.
Shame that most fathers and brothers have been too domesticated by their wives and mothers. Things could be different.
Oh, and I see a LOT of very attractive and average girls in college already splattered on the wall in their late teens.
Ramble,
“Desi, it is a little odd to hear you use the Alpha/Beta terms. I would not have pegged you for someone who would decide to make use of that paradigm.
I am assuming that you do not buy into in the way that the likes of Roissy does, but still.”
The healthier a society, the more SMV lines up with MMV, so one can speak of alpha (higher relative status) and beta (lower relative status) without much controversy. A mark of the disease in the SMP is the bifurcation between SMV and MMV that causes confusion when using the terms.
In this case, I’m speaking of alpha* in terms of dominance, and its clear at least to me that young women are screening for the capacity for dominance in their mating choices, and this preference is bleeding over into the political arena.
I was talking to a group of young (22-25) people who had watched the debate and were really impressed by Romney’s performance. I asked if he’d shown any dominance and one of them said “Oh yeah, he was a total dick!” in a surprised tone of voice like they never expected that from him. They saw that as a good thing.
Tit-for-tat starts with trust, but it requires the capacity to retaliate (stand up for oneself or one’s side) if the other isn’t playing fair. People, especially men, who don’t show that capacity are not readily entrusted with leadership positions, whether of a country or a marriage.
* – VD breaks out the sigma here as a man who could dominate status hierarchies but chooses not the pay attention to them. That’s where I’d be if I had my druthers. I don’t.
”Yeah, but men age too. Most of the widows I see can still pull a guy comparable to the late husband.”
Yeah, but if the guy doesn’t get married and doesn’t bother with relationships he can amass quite a bit of cash and status, which will help him pull very attractive young women. Are the young women attracted to the guy’s bank account? Sure, but so are most women who marry betas.
@Mullan
Dry humping is vastly underrated, at least from a female POV.
I think I read that the average woman’s ideal is something like 13 minutes. Sounds about right. Any guy who thinks we want to go for hours is sorely (heh) mistaken. Half and hour all in, and then the new episode of Homeland.
And the strangest thing is that she says she’ll think back on it when online porn doesn’t do the trick for her. Why would she do that if the sex was bad? Clearly, she’s saying that the turn-on is the identity of the male, the validation, that he chose her (even though he didn’t). My guess is she’ll masturbate thinking of the scene in the bar, not the bedroom.
Ana,
“I’m getting the feeling that you have a thing for bad girls. Don’t listen to the Sirens they will make you drown.”
Heh – don’t worry about that, they tend to drop me like a rock when I (infrequently) try. They’re used to dominance games one way or the other (likely due to family dynamics growing up) and all I know from my own family is positive-sum egalitarian.
All my relationships (6) that lasted over a month were with women of with N<3. The current one going well in the early stages is mid-30's and I'm almost certain her N is 1.
“Dry humping is vastly underrated, at least from a female POV.”
Always been my go to move.
“the more sexual partners a woman acquires, the quicker she hits the wall.”
Wisdom. There is a reason why throughout history only a very small group of women were promiscuous in any generation. For one, they were predisposed to “handling it” and it was enough to go around for men who just wanted sex. Just like only a very small number of people ever got to hear an orchestra – today anyone can if they have electric and a disc. So today, that small group of multi cocked women has expanded greatly but most women, like long ago, are not predisposed to handling it. The angst is palpable.
So, apropos of whether or not TCF finds a husband, here are some additional points.
She may well, I don’t know. She has certainly limited herself. Her behavior alone shrank the pool of men who will even consider her dramatically. Being public about it shrank it further still.
But her predicament is worse than even that, I’d say. Obviously, guys who care about N are out. But what about guys who could be convinced to get past the N? The public way she boasted about this is a huge problem. Tom will be along later to say I am insecure, but here’s the brute truth: even a guy who can get over a high N is not likely to want to come face to face with her former conquerers. Nor is he likely to relish the prospect of having the people he introduces here to KNOW that she was a proud slut in her former life.
And it gets worse from there. The UMC/Davos class professes to be “non-judgmental about matters of sex but really they just conceal their judgementalism under layers of other concerns. So, right, we don’t judge what you do in the bedroom or how we live your private lives. But you can bet that HR will be Googling the hell out of you before they hire you and when they find stuff like this … offer withdrawn. Not that they will ever say why.
So her own prospects are limited. But a potential hubby has to take that into account too. In the world in which I live/work, he really can’t bring a slut like that to a conference or corporate function and not expect to suffer for it. No one will say so, but all the men will think him a fool. I know I would. His career would likely suffer and his social life definitely would.
In response to P J
The few high N women I’ve been with were not anything to write home or to this blog about. Not dead fishes so much but talked a big talk and didn’t deliver. Just because a girl has been around doesn’t equate to openness or being exciting in the bed at all, nor does it automatically lead to some universal man pleasing skill. Every guy is different.
Low N 18 year old I was in a LTR with @ 19 was super enthusiastic, very open minded and whole lot of fun in bed. She had very little experience at all. We did pretty much everything that didn’t involve extreme pain, cutting or poo and pee.Those high N “sex goddesses” however balked at anything other than basic sex and blowjobs.
I know that SOME women can handle casual, but a lot simply can’t. I think it’s a really bad idea to essentially shame those that don’t want to have casual by promoting a cultural meme of women should be out racking up numbers like any guy can or she’s a loser. I mean this is my limited casual experience, but both of those started out with the women saying explicitly “this is just sex and nothing more”… 3 months later I’m somehow the anti-christ because I won’t date them…? This is where the damage gets done.
Me: For me as an INTJ, my first thought would have been, aren’t you concerned that you might wind up on the front page of a newspaper as the woman who disappeared, got knifed in an alley, tossed out of a window, got murdered in her apartment, etc.? Don’t you have any natural sense of self-preservation?????
This reminds me when I didn’t know I was watching the movie version of “Sexcapades of a married whore while her husband and kids are out of town aka the bridges of Madison county” when I saw Meryl Streep character inviting the photographer new in town to stay in her home I though. OH “this is a thriller about a stupid women getting murdered or kidnapped and having to scape!” And back then Clint Eastwood only played bad guys so that didn’t helped. Five minutes later I couldn’t believe what the freak the movie was really about.
“Escaping from biology” strikes me as magical thinking.
I like the term Trascending Biology…much better or still unrealistic?
Every woman hits The Wall. The only question is when, and how hard.
Captain Susan I detect another failure on male/female communication. I will attempt to engage. If I don’t survive the mission tell my mother I love her.
I think the problem with the metaphor of “The Wall” is that it gives the imaginary of a moment in which you will suddenly become invisible to any men and for women this is not true and we all know never will be.
Is more accurate that is a slowly decline in the number and/or quality of males you are going to be. There is a very good scene in “The mirror has two faces” where Mimi Rogers character (who has been hot all her life) explain to Barbra Straisand (Who recently became hot) how it works, paraphrasing from memory” At the peak you enter a room and all eyes of the men are on you, but slowly every time you enter the room less and less men look at you till one day you realized that they are looking at someone else now your moment passed”
The pain of the wall is that a woman slowly start to hamsterize and compromise in order to try to keep the same level of SMV and is better to hamsterize in order to date a man that is lower in your long list of requirements than you expected than to be single, of course NAWALT I do think some women change when their estrogen levels get lower, medication or therapy allows them to see the world differently but as with cads is a huge risk, YMMV.
From reading the exerpts of Clark Flory, she is trying to back away from casual sex a few times. I don’t know if she has made it. It appears to be a bad habit to break. That’s why men don’t trust women with pasts. People don’t really change. Certainly time changes you, but at 28, she has many more casual humping years left. She might not quit until she is over her casual sex days and then, it is only because she was refused. She will still visit bars. She can’t avoid going. It’s like a moth to a light. She gets something out of the encounters and it isn’t the sex.
There is no reason that she knows what a long term relationship involves. Casual sex and LTR are not the same. One means no attachment, which she loves. The other means attachment and commitment, which is a “danger.” She will only end up breaking a guy’s hearts since she is heartless in that respect. She should only be with people with similar situations. Then she’ll write about it like the porn writer that she is.
I understand all this. it was more that you were using the terms Alpha and Beta and in a fairly simple fashion. Granted, I will often use the term Beta when feeling lazy. Otherwise, I find the terms Alpha and Beta (even with the added Sigma, Omega and Herb terms thrown in for added nuance) to be way too simple to be all that helpful in describing what is actually happening in the real world.
Very good post Susan. Not a lot to comment on. You might want to check out this site: betcheslovethis.com. It’s pretty funny, and I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a pitch-perfect skewering of this type of girl, or a semi-serious attempt to codify the lifestyle. Anyway, what you should really focus on is no. 8 on the list, as well as all the “Dear Betch” and “Dear Head Pro” columns. You’ll find that despite the site representing the most utterly narcissistic, nasty aspects of modern female culture, almost all of the sex/dating advice is harsh, conservative, and focused on low-N and relationships. And how many of the girls writing in are writing about falling for guys or how to get a guy into a relationship. This at a site geared towards the supposed ice queens of the female world.
Any guy who thinks we want to go for hours is sorely (heh) mistaken.
Men are so stupid. I can’t believe that men have been misleading young males all these years by telling them that they need to go all night to be considered studs.
Luckily, women have been correcting this idea so that we did not go too far astray.
re: Dry Humping
Susan/Desi,
Are you guys talking about touching her over her clothes or this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTT43Kn-tNM
“I think I read that the average woman’s ideal is something like 13 minutes. Sounds about right. Any guy who thinks we want to go for hours is sorely (heh) mistaken.”
Is premature ejaculation a problem? I must think it isn’t. Women say they feel empty after sex so men, like myself, assume its because we tried to finish too quickly before the women had a chance to warm up. I’m confused.
“Nor is he likely to relish the prospect of having the people he introduces here to KNOW that she was a proud slut in her former life.”
“he really can’t bring a slut like that to a conference or corporate function and not expect to suffer for it. No one will say so, but all the men will think him a fool. ”
ALL the men. What sluts and their feminist advocates want so desperately is the devaluation of pussy and female sexuality so that women can just go do whatever with men and then have those same and other men not even consider that it happened. The real cherry on the cake is people actually celebrating it. Why? Because women are in such shock that something so easy to get and feels so good can actually harm them socially in the future. Its not about so-called “double standards” or “madonna whore” claims. Its is solely a connection that men get and they don’t and there is no point in explaining it to them when its simply a matter of avoiding them completely.
Men are so stupid. I can’t believe that men have been misleading young males all these years by telling them that they need to go all night to be considered studs.
Whnever I hear a guy claim to be literally able to “go all night,” I know I’ve found a liar–which is highly unattractive to me.
“I think I read that the average woman’s ideal is something like 13 minutes. Sounds about right. Any guy who thinks we want to go for hours is sorely (heh) mistaken.”
Is there any truth to this!? If so I think I’m SOL…..
The two stalwarts toe to toe –
Amanda: I really liked your piece on going on a for-real date.
Tracy: This was literally my first for-real date ever.
Amanda: Ever? What do you consider the difference between a “for-real” date and what you called more of the hook-up culture?
Tracy: Well, I should be clear: I’ve online dated. I’ve gone on dates. But most often they’re presented super casually. Like, hey, “Let’s hang out.” This was the first time someone clearly said to me: I want to take you out on a date, and here is the plan. Typically, whether it’s with “hang out” dates or hookups, it’s very low-investment—emotionally, financially, you name it.
Amanda: What I liked about your piece was that you weren’t condemning hooking up; there’s an argument for keeping it light was the implication.
Tracy: Right. I think it’s great that people can get to know each other casually. Grab a burrito and a beer! Make out at the bar! But it’s also nice to not feel totally stuck with diminished romantic expectations—as in, I can’t expect more than a taqueria “hangout” arranged last-minute via text message.
Amanda: That’s something I’ve noticed that a lot of friends complain about since I’ve moved to NYC: They think a lot of guys are just a little too eager to keep it casual. Which makes me wonder if it’s just that now that I’m in my 30s, my friends are developing higher expectations, or if it’s a geographic thing, where men in Texas, where I used to live, were more serious from the get-go?
Tracy: I think both are probably very real factors! For me, at least, “hookups” have been a great way of getting to know myself, getting to know other people and getting to know what I want, romantically and sexually. But as I’ve gotten older—how I hate that phrase—I’ve wanted a broader spectrum of romantic scripts. And that’s when the hookup/low-commitment default became frustrating.
Amanda: I think that’s what I really liked—your high regard for diversity. It’s not that hookups are bad, you said, but that they seem mandatory. Why do you think it got to that point?
Tracy: I can at least speak to my own experience: I think I gravitated toward casual hookups during a time when I wasn’t quite ready for more serious commitment. I needed some time to play and experiment. I think many people feel that way in their 20s. We’re spending more time single than ever before. I also think it might have something to do with the current emphasis on independence and individualism for both men and women. There’s a greater desire to make yourself, rather than to be made by someone else. And casual dating/hooking up is much more conducive to that.
Amanda: That’s something that really was brought home in Hanna Rosin’s Atlantic piece about hooking up. She spoke to researchers that said that women were driving the culture as much as men, in no small part because, frankly, boyfriends can get in the way of other goals like getting your career underway.
Tracy: Yep. I think it’s totally true for both sexes. It’s practical.
Amanda: A lot of people still buy the line that it’s something that men impose on women, that men are taking advantage of women’s, uh, “easiness”. That always bothered me, because there was never really a clear line for me between how quickly you slept with someone and whether or not it turned into wuv.
Tracy: Right!
Amanda: Your point was really satisfying, which is that what we really need is the ability to diversify: hook up if we want, go slow if we want, just do a bunch of different stuff depending on where we’re at. I think that sort of thing causes a lot of men anxiety, though. I’ve noticed a lot of men in online spaces clamoring for a script.
Tracy: Yes! There’s anxiety now about falling back on the more traditional dating script (which is not an entirely bad thing, mind you). I think it feels too desperate, too eager to many young men. And, of course, intimacy and vulnerability have always been absolutely terrifying.
Amanda: Did you go on a second date with flowers guy who wanted to do nothing more but make out on the first date? Do you mind my asking? (I’ve been in a relationship for over six years now, so other people’s stories are my entertainment.)
Tracy: Actually, we’ve gone on something like five dates in a little over a week!
Amanda: Wow, that’s a lot. Sounds like it’s been fun.
Tracy: Yes! It’s incredibly refreshing. And a large part of it is that I’m ready for that for the first time in my life, you know? It’s not like I’ve been yearning for that this whole time and have only now found a guy willing to give it to me.
Amanda: LOL yeah, that strikes me as an incredibly critical point. But that really leads to the question I know a bunch of men are asking themselves, which is how do you know what script a woman is interested in? How do you know if you should keep it light or show up with flowers and a request that you take it slow?
Tracy: Well, see, I think timing is so much of it. It really isn’t something that can be faked. You can only do what you’re ready to do. If you want to bring a woman flowers, do it. If you want to have casual flings, do that. Eventually you’ll find a lady who wants the same thing.
Amanda: That’s something I think gets lost in the overflow of dating advice out there, which is that it really is something you can figure out for yourself.
All my relationships (6) that lasted over a month were with women of with N<3. The current one going well in the early stages is mid-30's and I'm almost certain her N is 1.
Ohh neat! *crossingfingersforyou*
She might not quit until she is over her casual sex days and then, it is only because she was refused. She will still visit bars. She can’t avoid going. It’s like a moth to a light. She gets something out of the encounters and it isn’t the sex.
This is a good point someone commented about the married women he regularly beds and he says that the majority are afraid of being invisible. I think after getting used to the validation coming from dating a lot of men who you can tell the same boring story again and again and the will find it fascinating because is new and shiny. How much validation can ONE husband supply? After some years its bound to become something he knows already. I think this factor is overlooked over the sex, given how many of this women confess later that the sex sucked anyway so maybe aside from focusing on the sex focusing on “Where her sense of self comes from?” could help both for this women and for the men to find a suitable wife, YMMV.
Perhaps 70yo women can sometimes still pair off. I’d wager that those women are probably leaps and bounds above the average 21you women in morality and values, which at that age is far more important than looks.
Well, these are generally widows or divorcees who are established in their communities, not barflies.
that being said, I bet that 70yo women could have pulled a higher status man when she was in her prime.
They generally end up with men similar in status to their late husbands, sometimes even friends of their husbands.
OP
I hope it doesn’t bother her she asked me to be brutally honest but I will do it on HUS because I think it can help others.
I just say Sai pictures and I can tell you she is certifiable insane and/or need prescription glasses. She is really cute: Big eyes, sensual lips, clear skin, middle length hair… She looks better than me. She needs more internal work than outside work, a smile some eye contact and she will have a lot of attention.
I think her problem is similar to one I had obsessing about some body part and not seeing the rest. I was focusing in a small scar I have on my left knee ( I don’t scar well) when I was younger and I didn’t saw anything but that, obsessed about it thinking that I was pretty much Quasimodo. It took me a while to get over it, learn to recognize my good features and work around the weak features and just plain cover up the bad ones and then made peace, accepted and what is more important saw my body as worth it of give and receive pleasure, of give and create life.
LESSON OF THE DAY:
You don’t need to be perfect to be attractive.
Write that down on your mirror and read it everyday till sticks in your pretty head, Sai.
Anecdotes like this don’t prove anything. (Nor do your doctored stats, but that’s another issue.)
Sex positivism isn’t about casual sex! It’s about having the freedom and self knowledge to make the best choices for yourself.
But yeah, every time I post here to say that my personal life proves you wrong, you say that there will always be outliers and that doesn’t change the general cultural trends. And then you act like you don’t actually have a problem with my life choices.
But that’s not really what these posts are about. These posts are about slut-shaming women like me so that we have less sex and thus make it easier for “good” women to find husbands. And that’s just not how sex works.
J – “They generally end up with men similar in status to their late husbands, sometimes even friends of their husbands.”
I’m somewhat creeped out by this comment. I guess I’d like to know my wife could find company should I pass before her, but with one of my friends?! I suppose that if I manage to live to a ripe old age, I won’t be too concerned about it at that point.
“These posts are about slut-shaming women like me so that we have less sex and thus make it easier for “good” women to find husbands. ”
Damn. They figured us out. I guess we should just wrap it up folks, the pozzies are onto us! /sarcasm off
Yes Sarah, its all about you and your sisters in arms.
Did you happen to see the solipsism post? You might want to give it a read.
”But that’s not really what these posts are about. These posts are about slut-shaming women like me so that we have less sex and thus make it easier for “good” women to find husbands. And that’s just not how sex works.”
I have no issue with women like you. And guys need to have some fun before they seek out good women. The bone I have with women like you comes from the danger of women like you being way too many, and my sister being too near the whole lot of you for my comfort.
I’m sure a handful of you turn out fine, but nature did not intend for women to be on the cock-festival. I also don’t like how the whole bunch of you manipulate the guys who aren’t confident or never grew up with a positive male model of how to be dominant, ending up with the first girl(mostly girls like you) who puts out for them.
“Sex positivism isn’t about casual sex! It’s about having the freedom and self knowledge to make the best choices for yourself.”
When did this “sex positivism” start? Who invented the term? Seems like a new label for the same old thing. What is an example of sex negativism?
@Sarah.
How does your views differ from the rest of the commenters here ?
The other reaction -
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/10/10/tracy_clark_flory_goes_on_a_real_date_reports_back_that_just_like_casual.html
.
@Mule Chewing Briars
“She’s written 331 pages about sex, and has yet to have an orgasm.”
Leaves a pretty big hole in the meme about how those empowering decisions to hook-up (resulting in High N) nets all of that valuable “experience” and “getting to know my body…what turns me on…” stuff that will be so beneficial to her and her future LTR mate.
Even assuming there are equal numbers of women who go down that path and figure out all their buttons and levers in all kinds of positive ways as there are who have nothing to show but High N and a bifurcated view of sex and intimacy, it seems like a risky and potentially costly path to “experience”.
And count me out as the “next” guy who would be the target of the LTR who gets to unwind all of that. Her story demonstrates why the “experience” line is a major red flag for me. I’ll take my chances with an “inexperienced” woman who has the capacity and desire to build intimacy and mutual commitment and then spend a long weekend in bed.
The message that hooking-up, “test-driving” people as a means to gain all of this mystical experience is a dangerous manifestation of the sex-pos kulture. It is very telling that her story equates the sex so often with porn, since not only was she pretending (lying) to all those men, but to herself as well, thus denying anything remotely valuable in terms of real experience with intimacy and the true joys of sex. Yet here is a High N woman, with very little “experience” with the communication, closeness, exploration, – - and yes, orgasmic finale of actual intimacy and sex. It is rather sad really.
´´Leaves a pretty big hole in the meme about how those empowering decisions to hook-up (resulting in High N) nets all of that valuable “experience” and “getting to know my body…what turns me on…” stuff that will be so beneficial to her and her future LTR mate.´´
I don’t need to stick my penis inside every woman to know what I like. Most women(and most men) start in their masturbatory habits when they are very young. By the time a young woman becomes old enough to be sexually active(anything less than 18 to me feels wrong and foolish), she already knows what she likes, and should have no problem in telling her boyfriend what she wants him to do.
Sarah’s using excuses to justify her desires. Yeah, and Hugh Hefner still pops out viagra like water because he’s trying to find out if he’s heterosexual.
This is too good. In the words of Kenny Bania “That’s gold Jerry! Gold!”
Abbott thinks this broad is going to get married some day, but honestly I’d bet against it. Unlike a lot of her grllll power sisters out there, her personal life is forever archived on the interwebz, and even the most beta men, with their delusions of disney romance, will google her and decide to get a few pumps in before they dump her. I mean seriously…she got plowed by her favorite porn star and some guy would want that to be the mother of his children? Even betas can only handle so much, and that’s beyond the realm of acceptability.
Her only chance is to find some mangina male feminist, but she would probably hate that kind of guy anyways based on her own accord.
The countdown to her first cat is already starting…
”Her only chance is to find some mangina male feminist, but she would probably hate that kind of guy anyways based on her own accord.”
Isn’t manzboobs or what’s his name single? But does he produce sperm at all?
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